Possession

by Rene Gutteridge

“I noticed. Thank you.”

  “It wasn’t a gift,” she said, her words purring against the car noise. “I wanted to know.”

  “Wanted to know what?”

  “If you did it. Killed that woman. Hurt my daughter.” A hint of fear warbled in her voice. “And as much as I dislike you, Vance, I decided to take Conrad’s advice. That you didn’t.”

  Vance let out a sigh of relief and didn’t try to hide it. “I would never hurt Lindy or Conner.”

  The car turned in to the large half-circle drive of a luxury hotel, at least twenty stories high. A bellhop opened the door and was about to announce a formal greeting when Joan shooed him away and closed the door. “I’ve read the entire police report—it helps to have friends in high places. I also read the entirety of the notes Conrad wrote up.”

  “That’s confidential information.”

  “Nothing is confidential when the price is right.” She smiled, the jagged wrinkles over her top lip smoothing against the stretching skin. “I’ve concluded a few things. First, I believe that you were not involved in Lindy and Conner’s disappearance.”

  “You already said that.”

  “But I do believe you’re suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  Vance swallowed, looked away.

  “I’ve been a therapist for thirty years, Vance. I know when someone is sick. And by the way, I am not the only one who knew. Lindy suspected it herself.”

  “Lindy?”

  “I am her mother. Daughters confide in their mothers.”

  Vance looked sideways at her. “You two don’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “Maybe it’s unconventional, but she’s still my daughter. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she grabbed a tissue from her purse, poking it to the outside of each eye. “I couldn’t live if something happened to her.” She sniffled. “And that is why I have given you the full resources you need to find her.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Follow me.” Joan exited the car gracefully, and Vance followed her through the swooshing gold-plated doors into the lobby. Her long strides carried her across the marble floor and to the elevator, which opened as if it sensed her coming.

  They rode to the top floor, twenty-two, and exited straight into a luxurious suite with two walls of solid windows. It was bigger than his condo.

  Vance was startled to find a man sitting on the couch, facing away from him. He instinctively grabbed for his missing gun, just as the man stood and greeted Joan with a handshake.

  “Harmon, thank you for meeting us here on such short notice.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “This is my son-in-law, Vance Graegan.”

  Harmon nodded but didn’t offer a hand.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Vance said. He noticed the dining table. It was covered with all kinds of papers, whereas the rest of the suite looked perfectly tidy.

  Joan walked to the table and looked at Vance. “I took the liberty of pulling all the phone records, all the documents, all the paper trails you might need to locate them.”

  Vance exhaled. He looked at Joan. He couldn’t stop the tears that rushed to his eyes. “And Harmon?”

  “He’s your own private investigator. He cost me a pretty penny, but I hear he’s worth every cent. He’ll do whatever you need him to do.”

  Harmon nodded and Vance saw the twinkle in his eyes of a man who loved justice.

  “I am going to need a—”

  “Gun?” Joan smiled and motioned to Harmon, who reached for a small bag and pulled out a Glock 17. “Done. What else?”

  Vance looked at the table. “Time. But I’m afraid we don’t have much.” He walked to the glass wall that overlooked Redwood City. “I know one thing. She’s still here. And that is her first mistake. It’s going to cost her.”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute.” She looked at Harmon, who somehow read in her expression a signal that he should move to the other room. “Sit down,” she told Vance.

  Vance sat at the dining table, eyeing the paperwork, wondering where he should begin, wondering what this delay was for.

  Joan slid into a chair, crossing her thin legs at the ankle. “First, you and I have some business to discuss.”

  “What is this about? I need to get to my wife and son.” The words hurt as they came out of his throat.

  She picked up a tablet and pen that sat next to her. “Do you have headaches?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Headaches, Vance. Surely you don’t need a definition.”

  “What do you need to know that for?”

  “Do you or don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Vance said, the word barely escaping his gritted teeth. “Often. Migraines, I think.”

  “What about anger? Do you feel it constantly?”

  “I feel it right now,” he said. He ignored her writing notes and grabbed Lindy’s phone records. Almost all the calls were to him or to a local number that he assumed was Karen’s. Something stood out to him, though. She’d called the Montgomery County Police Department. His police department. There was also another Maryland number that he didn’t recognize.

  “What about nightmares?”

  Vance glanced at her. “Yeah, Joan. Those too. Not every night, but yeah, I relive it sometimes.”

  “What about when you’re awake? Do you see the scenes of those days when you’re awake?”

  Vance didn’t answer. Did he win for having the most intrusive mother-in-law on the planet?

  “Vance,” she said, and there was actually a twinge of kindness in her voice. Maybe she could muster that up when she was playing therapist. “I need you to look at me. Concentrate on me.”

  “Why? What is the point of this?”

  Her stern eyes narrowed. “Because you’re getting ready to go save your wife and son, and PTSD is triggered by stress. I am assuming you’re under a great deal of it right now.” She put her bony arms on the table and leaned in slightly. “You’ve got to understand what is happening to you. You’re going to have to reason your way out of this illness to stay in reality and find Lindy and Conner. And the only way you’ll be able to do that is to grasp what is happening in your mind.”

  Ironically, a mild headache was shifting around his skull. He looked away. He hated those scrutinizing eyes. “I hear bullets whizzing past my head. It even feels like my hair moves as they go by.” He glanced at her. She didn’t look startled, which, strangely, brought him some comfort. He moved his gaze to the window, a beautiful scene of redwoods surrounding a bustling city. “I get skull-crushing headaches. I used to feel numb. I couldn’t get any emotions to kick in.”

  “Go on,” she said. She’d slid reading glasses on and was peering through them, down her long nose, as she wrote notes.

  He didn’t want to go on. But he did. The last thing he needed was for her to hound him, and she would if he didn’t answer sufficiently. “I still can’t stand in open spaces.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, writing quickly.

  He didn’t say anything else, and she finally looked up. She waited but he remained quiet. Then she said, “All right. I want to go back to this feeling of a bullet going past you. Tell me more about it.”

  Vance sighed and wore his disgust heavy on his shoulders as he talked. “Sometimes I hear glass shattering, like the bullet has gone through a window and broken it. Maybe a car window.”

  “Do you hear anything else?”

  “No.”

  “What about other diversions from reality.”

  “Like what?”

  “Do you hear people? See people?”

  “No.” But his conscience whispered otherwise.

  She wrote some final notes, then took the glasses off her face. “When did all this start?”

  Vance stared at the table. “It started about three or four months after we wrapped up the investigation, I guess.”

  “Did you ever seek professional medical help?”
/>   Vance hesitated. He’d told Lindy he had. It was one of many lies he’d told her that led to the unraveling of their relationship. But he never could understand how talking about what happened was going to relieve him of his pain. The other detectives and officers had seemed to recover fine. He always suspected that this lingered because of the lie he buried, the cover-up he tangled himself in trying to save Erin’s career and get her off the bottle.

  For a while, the problems seemed to dissipate on their own. His headaches never left, but they happened less frequently. He thought he was getting over it.

  “Vance?”

  “What?”

  “Did you ever seek professional medical help?”

  The word felt impossible to speak. “No. I told Lindy that I did, but I didn’t. I didn’t think I needed it.”

  Joan’s expression morphed from concern to fear. Vance wasn’t sure what the trigger was until she said, “I already knew that.”

  “Then why did you ask me?”

  “A woman called me when you first moved here to tell me that very fact.”

  Vance eyed her, trying to figure out her angle. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just what I said. A woman called anonymously, and all she said was that you never went to therapy like you told your wife.”

  Vance stared through the stark reality that was facing him. “Erin called you.”

  “I can only assume it is the same woman who took Lindy and Conner.” Joan sighed harshly, the first sign she might be as flustered as he felt. “I played right into her hands. She knew I’d tell Lindy.”

  “She told me she wanted to disrupt my life. She wanted me to see, feel everything that she’s going through.”

  “How dangerous is she?”

  “I never would’ve believed she was capable of this. But she’s killed two people. I think she was sent over the edge by a drunk-driving accident. A child died.”

  Joan leaned across the table, her posture as straight as if it’d been starched, and her eyes locked on him like he was prey. “You find them, do you understand me? You do whatever you have to do, but you find them.”

  “I will. Now can I get to it? without interruption?”

  “I will see to it you have whatever you need. But, Vance, be aware of your circumstances. Your condition. It is triggered by stress.” She then put her purse on the table and pulled out an unmarked pill bottle. She handed it to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “I want you to take these. Morning, noon, night. It will help. It’s what we can do in the short term.”

  “Are these antipsychotic meds?”

  “Just take them.” She rose, didn’t wait for a rebuttal. “Now, I am going to go get you a proper meal.” Joan whisked her purse onto her shoulder and walked out the door.

  The private detective, Harmon, came back into the room. “Where do you want me to start?”

  Vance took a nearby notepad and scribbled some information onto it. “This is the car we’re looking for. It’s cherry red, and I wrote down the make and model. I don’t know the tags. It was Karen’s, and Erin took it when she grabbed Lindy and Conner. For all I’m learning about Karen, it may have been stolen to begin with.”

  “Got it. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “I’m fairly certain Erin rented a car when she flew here. Find out what you can about that, though I’m certain she’s dumped it by now. Also,” Vance said, trying to keep his emotions in check, “I need to find out whether Erin bought a round-trip ticket or a one-way.”

  “Does that matter at this point?” Harmon asked.

  “Yeah,” Vance sighed. “It will tell me how much she planned on this and what her intentions were. If she bought a one-way, then there’s literally no going back for her.”

  Harmon handed him a cell phone. “Use this. I’ll call you as soon as I have any information.”

  Vance watched him leave and tried to find a place deep within himself where he could push out the fear and focus, be a detective, search for the clues. It was possible, but waves of fear crashed over him every few minutes, when the gravity of the situation weighed on him and he understood the consequences of failure, consequences he knew he could not live with.

  He picked up the paper with Lindy’s cell phone history. Why would she call his former police station? Maybe she was just getting records. Something simple like that.

  Except there was something nagging at him about it.

  So he called. He knew who would answer the phone, and he knew she knew everything that went on at the police station. If Lindy talked to her, she would remember and probably know why she had called.

  “Montgomery County Police Department.”

  “Adelle?”

  “Vance Graegan, is that you?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Honey, I’d recognize that sweet voice of yours anywhere.”

  Vance smiled, mostly to try to keep his voice light. “Adelle, it’s good to hear your voice too. I really miss all of you.”

  “Of course you do! There ain’t nobody like us around, now is there. And I sure enjoyed talking with your beautiful wife the other day too.”

  Vance tried not to sigh with relief, but this was going better than he expected. “Oh yeah? What was Lindy calling about?”

  “Strange, actually.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, she was wanting to see about how to get ahold of Doug Cantella.”

  The sounds around Vance disappeared like they’d been sucked into a vacuum, and he felt the pulsing of his blood against his eardrums. “Doug?”

  “I know,” Adelle said in her singsongy voice. “I guess she hadn’t heard that Doug had passed away.”

  “No . . . I guess not . . .”

  “Anyway, how is California? You guys taking over the West Coast one Reuben at a time?”

  “Something like that,” Vance said, but he was breathless. “Good talking to you, Adelle.”

  “You too, sweetheart. Where can I direct your call?”

  “Andy Drakkard.”

  “You got it.”

  But he hung up as soon as Adelle made the transfer. He stood and went to the large window that faced west. His forehead pressed against it, he stared not at the brilliant and beautiful scenery, but at the lie that must’ve slapped Lindy in the face.

  Of course Doug was dead.

  Vance swallowed as he thought of Lindy hearing that news. Because Vance had said that he was very much alive.

  And lately he was.

  He knew of course he wasn’t.

  But he was.

  Vance never wanted Lindy to see him like that. He was her protector, and more than anything he wanted her to feel safe, most especially around him.

  He’d fought through a lot of emotional detachment and even rage, which had perhaps been the biggest monster he had to slay.

  Mostly, he was okay.

  And when he wasn’t, he was always able to come back. Sometimes he just needed to slip away to a darker place. The light always looked brighter when he returned. And he’d always been able to return.

  Vance walked back to the table. Another Maryland number appeared on her cell phone records. He dialed it, unsure of who might answer the phone.

  “Dr. Nancy Sullivan’s office.”

  “Sorry, wrong number.” Vance threw down his phone. She knew. She knew! These phone calls pointed to one thing, and that was that his wife really was beginning to discover things about Vance he’d never wanted her to know.

  He regretted the lies. So much. And then when he came to the conclusion that he couldn’t lie to her anymore, it was too late. She might never know how much he regretted keeping these things from her. And she might die believing that he didn’t trust her enough.

  It wasn’t her that he didn’t trust. It was never her. It was always himself. At all costs, he had to get her back. She deserved to live much more than he.

  The orange pill bottle stared him down. He opened it. A hand
ful of tiny white pills were crowded at the bottom.

  He poured a few into his hand. He needed his mind sharp. And these were certain to have side effects.

  But his mind was where he was most likely to be betrayed.

  Vance closed his hand around the pills.

  His focus spread wide over all the papers. Joan was right. Stress triggered a lot of dysfunction in his mind. Could he stay calm? Could he keep his grasp on reality?

  The tarot card glided through his thoughts. Had he imagined the mud flaps?

  He tried to focus. That wasn’t important now. He had to get his family back. That’s all he needed to focus on.

  The papers blurred in front of him. His head throbbed with a sudden pain that cracked through his skull like an invisible whip. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to set aside the pain. He took deep breaths. He had to stay calm. His wife’s and child’s lives depended on it.

  Detach, he told himself. Try to think like a detective, not like a husband. He opened his hand and wondered at the tiny white pills. Antipsychotic? Antianxiety?

  One pill could relieve him of this. But he was certain his mind would not be as sharp. He’d be lethargic. Sleepy. Still, could he work and fight off his demons, all at the same time?

  A nearby trash can caught his eye. He opened his hand again. They were so small.

  29

  “How much money do you have in your bank account?” Erin sat at the small table in their motel room, stacks of cash piled upon it.

  Lindy’s anxiety level had risen. Erin had uncuffed Conner, and he was standing next to her, gawking at the cash. It was like he’d forgotten she was the bad guy.

  “How much money is this?” he asked. He stuck out a finger, touched one of the piles. Erin smiled at him and that smile made Lindy’s stomach roll. It was the smile of manipulation. She was up to something.

  “Thousands,” Erin said, grinning at him. She took one of the bills from a rubber-banded stack and handed it to him.

  “A twenty? Is this mine?”

  “Sure. And if you continue to be a good boy, there’s more to come.”

  Conner turned and held out the money to Lindy. “Mom! Look at this. I could buy at least . . . Well, how many, Mom?”

  Lindy tried to catch his attention with her eyes. “How many what?”